Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

  Marcy Carsey: There was a time after The Cosby Show went on the air when I couldn’t pay my bills. There’s a lag time, and we were truly independent, so we couldn’t pay ourselves. We just weren’t making any money. I mortgaged my house. I had no backup, no family I could borrow money from.

  Tom left the business decisions to me because he knew I was a risk taker, so I took risks. As a result, I couldn’t afford to get my dry cleaning out when I had the number one show on television.

  Warren: Cosby ended that first season averaging over forty million viewers each week (Nielsen Media Research). With the success of The Cosby Show, we began to entertain ideas about building a “Night of Bests.” We had momentum and measurable success; we were finally giving CBS’s Magnum P.I. real competition for viewers. We believed if we shored up our schedule, we could actually win the night. In the fall of 1984, we shifted Family Ties out of its Wednesday slot, and our Thursday night lineup opened with Cosby at 8:00. Family Ties followed at 8:30. Then came Cheers, followed by Night Court and Hill Street Blues.

  By the end of the season, Cosby only trailed Dynasty and Dallas in the ratings. Family Ties was the fifth most popular show on TV. We were handily throttling both Magnum P.I. and Simon & Simon on CBS. Cheers had vaulted from seventy-seventh to twelfth. Night Court was twentieth. Hill Street Blues was thirtieth. We had the makings of an evening that both viewers and advertisers might flock to for years to come.

  Tom Werner: I always felt like Brandon and Warren were our partners. It’s quite different today with networks and suppliers. They’re often our adversaries. We had the same goal. To get the show right, get it to the audience, and hope they watch.

  Warren: Boy, did they watch. From 1985 to 1990, Cosby was the most popular show on all of TV. Bill Cosby’s successful transition from stand-up to sitcom would make a whole era of network comedy possible. And it was the engine for Thursday nights. It was the engine for NBC.

  The follow-up piece of development from Tom, Marcy, and Bill was A Different World, a spin-off of The Cosby Show starring Lisa Bonet, who was leaving the Huxtable nest and going off to college. The show never had the power of Cosby, but it was a solid success and filled in very nicely (we still dominated the competition) in its 8:30 time slot on Thursday nights.

  In the summer of 1987, Marcy and Tom and their chief creative executive, Caryn Mandabach, invited me to a show at Universal Amphitheatre. Louie Anderson and Roseanne Barr were performing. They were eager for me to see Roseanne because they believed that like Bill Cosby, she could be at the center of a family comedy.

  I thought Roseanne’s performance was vulgar and kind of gross. The women in the audience certainly laughed at her jokes and cheered her on, but of the two comedians I saw that night, I far preferred Louie Anderson.

  Marcy told me, “Forget Louie. We want Roseanne.” I asked what they were looking for, and she said, “Six episodes on the air.”

  The next day I discussed the situation with Brandon and shared with him my reaction. He had zero interest in Roseanne. “Tell them to fix A Different World,” he said. I suggested we offer Marcy and Tom a pilot in case they were right and we were wrong. After all, they were producing the number one show on television. Brandon agreed, and that’s what we did. Marcy turned us down, so we lost Roseanne. I seem to recall the show had a decent (nine years!) run on ABC. Whoops. Thank God I had Cosby and The Golden Girls as part of my comedy development résumé, or I would not have survived that screwup.

  Years later when Roseanne was the number one show and she was appearing as a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jay called me at my office and asked if I had anything I wanted to say to Roseanne on air? I ran down to the stage, onto the set, shoved my hand into my pocket, and threw a big wad of cash at her and begged her to come to NBC. Roseanne kept her job and my cash.

  Thanks to an invigorated and widely watched comedy lineup featuring Cosby, Family Ties, The Golden Girls, Cheers, and Night Court and a renewed emphasis on quality drama embodied by Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, we had finally developed at NBC the sorts of shows that critics loved and audiences flocked to. For the television season ending in the spring of 1986, half of the top thirty shows were running on our network. NBC had flourished into a conspicuous success, a gaudy jewel in the crown of our parent company, RCA. People noticed. One guy in particular.

  Jack Welch: I went after RCA in 1986 because we were being attacked by the Japanese on every front. I was looking for a long-term cash-flow business. A business that was secure with regulation, that foreigners couldn’t take. A beachhead while we reshuffled the portfolio. I tried CBS and got turned down, but by trying CBS and getting the gossip out there that I was running around trying to do it, I got the call that RCA might.

  I didn’t think, “We must be in entertainment.” Mine was a vision of raw numbers. We needed cash. The Japanese were coming after us in many areas—television sets, semiconductors. It turned out RCA was a much better deal than CBS would have been because we got all the RCA properties. RCA was the number one TV-set producer, which we merged with our number three or four, and that gave us a strong TV package, which we then traded with Thomson to get a medical business.

  Our aerospace business was okay. RCA’s was better than okay. We merged those and got their management to run it. We sold that business to Lockheed Martin for $3.5 to $4 billion. So we got our money back and still got a free NBC.

  Warren: While RCA had been relatively benign and uninvolved, as corporate overlords go, our new relationship with GE promised to be something altogether different. “Neutron Jack” Welch had a reputation for ruthlessness where profits were concerned. All of the divisions under the GE umbrella made their quarters. Or else.

  Brian Pike: Jack Welch flew into Florida for a management meeting. By accident, I was sitting at his table. He was very engaging. There was nothing about him that was officious or difficult at dinner. He was lovely.

  In the corner of the room was a whiteboard, and we thought it was left over from an earlier meeting. But Jack walked up to this board, and he said, “I think I should explain to you what I do and how I spend my days. I’ve got all these companies, and I run the people who run the companies and figure out how it all fits together.”

  He draws a graph, an x- and y-axis graph. I remember this because I thought my life ended. He draws these boxes above and below the line. He says the companies above the line are cash-generating companies, and the companies below the line are cash-eating companies. They’re profitable, but they need a lot of cash.

  He said the reason he’d bought NBC was because we were throwing off tons of cash. I thought, “Oh my God, nobody ever explained it to me that way. I was just there to make TV shows.”

  John Agoglia: When GE came in, I just wanted to meet my budget. We had an annual budget, and I knew GE would beat the shit out of me if I didn’t meet it.

  Warren: Technically, the way it worked was this. In August you had to have a business plan that represented the next calendar year. You’d yet to premiere that fall’s shows. You didn’t know what was going to be a hit, what was going to be a failure. You didn’t know what the spot sales were going to be, how much revenue you were going to have. We plugged in everything we did know, and we’d fill every single hour with a show.

  It was a list of assumptions. We had to have a success plan and a failure plan, and it all had to work for the budget. In the course of an ordinary year during my tenure running NBC, we’d hear about 1,000 pitches for new series ideas. Of those, 150 might go to script. Of those, we might make a dozen comedy pilots and a dozen drama pilots (at approximately $1 million apiece for the comedies and $2 million apiece for the dramas). Of those, three or four comedies and the same number of dramas might make the schedule. If one comedy and one drama stuck and was worth renewing, we’d had a good year.

  In many ways the TV business is all about managing failure. Failure is very costly. A successful show is a rare commodity.

  John Agog
lia: Jack Welch called me and Brandon up and flew down to L.A. to have lunch with us. We met him at a restaurant on Ventura at Coldwater. I didn’t eat anything. I was like blubber. We were trying to figure out what he wanted to know, what he was going to do. We rode back with him in his limo, and he said, “Why don’t you …,” and made some sort of programming suggestion.

  As I was getting out of the car, I told him, “Jack, that’s a great idea, but we just don’t have the cash to do it. We won’t meet the quarter.”

  About forty-five minutes later, the phone rings and it’s Jack Welch from his plane. He screams at me, “If you were fucking smart, you’d know how to bury some money and make your quarter.”

  Warren: Jack Welch’s reputation as a hard-as-nails businessman was well earned. I remember attending a conference at GE’s Crotonville facility in Ossining, New York, in the early nineties. It’s a university setting where you examine your business practices, study your competition, and hopefully come away with an enlightened game plan.

  John Agoglia: We were talking about NBC’s lack of success in development—we’d had a really bad year—and Jack had some numbers he put up. Perry Simon, an executive in development, raised his hand and said, “We don’t have enough money.” We’d spent $32 million on development that year, and all of it had failed. It was like waving a red flag in front of Jack.

  Warren: Perry made the mistake of asking Jack Welch, “How would you do it?” The room got really quiet. Jack said, “It’s not my job. I don’t know how to do it. That’s up to you.”

  Unfortunately, that was probably the moment Don Ohlmeyer decided Perry would not be in NBC’s future.

  John Agoglia: You can’t blame your boss for your failures. You just can’t do that. Shit doesn’t flow upstream.

  Warren: Fundamentally, the network’s relationship with GE and Jack Welch was a pretty happy and healthy one, provided we continued to kick off cash as Welch expected. Bob Wright, formerly of Cox Cable, had been installed by Welch as president and CEO of NBC. His message was an incredible downer. Bob told us life would change, everybody would have more channel choices, and what we did wouldn’t matter. It was icy water in our faces, but he was right.

  Under Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff, there was no strategy at NBC. There was a philosophy. Bob Wright and GE told us, “You must have a strategy, or you won’t survive.” Bob Wright forced us to think about who we were as a network and what we wanted to become.

  I told Brandon the guys at Cap Cities and ABC knew right away if something was for them while we were still agonizing over it. They knew who they were and what fit their schedule. We were still a big tent with a very diverse lineup. That was fine for the eighties, when viewers had few choices, but things were changing. More homes were getting cable channels, and they wouldn’t just run network repeats forever. Bob Wright helped us focus.

  Bob Wright: People do want to see broadcast shows because, by definition, those are shows lots of other people are watching. I think that’s broadcast’s greatest strength. But it is the hardest form of television. It’s easy to go narrow, but it’s hard to stay broad and attractive. That’s why the failure rate is so high.

  The grading on broadcast shows is much tougher than the grading on cable shows. I use Fox as an example. People can go on Fox, and as long as they’re bitter and sarcastic, the Fox viewers will watch them.

  I feared we’d get into some kind of tailspin at NBC as our shows aged, and GE would just come in and clean house, get rid of everybody.

  Warren: In the face of all this gloomy news, it was our job to continue to develop and air shows that would keep the audience glued to the peacock. We were having a good run, but by the late eighties our shows were getting old and shedding audience, and we weren’t having much luck developing the next hot thing. We got conservative. Coming up with successful programming is anything but a science.

  John Agoglia: I learned an enormous amount from GE in terms of management technique, but some of their ideas were absolute bullshit. They had a guy do a computer matrix, which would guarantee you how to pick hit programs. He worked on it for two years. I mean, come on!

  Jack Welch: The news people would say I meddled a lot. Not entertainment. I wasn’t that good at programming, but I quite frankly didn’t think they were that good at it either. I thought it was a crapshoot.

  I loved The Tortellis. I knew it was a home run. Total flop. And I hated ALF, and it was a hit. That’s when I stopped mucking around in programming.

  Warren: However, that didn’t prevent Jack from pitching Wall Street, the series, after seeing Oliver Stone’s new hit movie. Starring Michael Douglas as Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko. “I think that would make a great series,” Jack told me.

  To my mind, that was a pitch, and I responded instinctively as a programmer. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jack,” I said. “Nobody gives a shit about those guys. All they care about is money.”

  I remember Jack Welch looked at me with his mouth hanging open. “I’m going back to the guys in electrical,” he told me. “They listen to me.”

  A couple of hours later, my life flashed before my eyes. I’d shot down Jack Welch, my new boss. What the hell was I thinking?

  John Agoglia: I gave a development report at the first GE board meeting I went to, and some guy from power systems or jet engines said to me, “What you guys have to do is pick the hit shows.” Jack Welch just winked at me.

  Warren: To give Jack Welch his due, network programming is part crapshoot, but it’s part savvy and judgment as well, tempered with an awful lot of hard work. Computer matrix? Not so much.

  Brandon Tartikoff and I had divergent views on the basics of program development. As I’ve said earlier, my preference was for turning talented people loose to shine. I reacted to the pitches that came through the door and tried to improve upon them where I could. I felt it was also my job to articulate to the creative community what our needs were—family comedy or medical procedural. Moreover, I aggressively preached to the entire TV industry the value of being at NBC—a network where a good idea could be nurtured into a hit show. That hit show would bring tremendous revenue to them beyond its network run. Brandon would send out word of ideas that were intriguing to him. Producers and writers would tailor their pitches to suit him.

  Brian Pike: NBC was run by committee until Brandon. He had a point of view, a very strong point of view about what TV should look like.

  When agents would call for meetings with heavy hitters, they’d call Brandon and ask him to give them ideas on what he wanted. So they would show up with some version of what Brandon had in mind.

  People would call me and say, “What are you looking for this year?” and I didn’t have a fucking clue. I wanted to know what they wanted.

  Brandon saw himself as this idea guy. He’d have these nuggets, and then everyone’s job was to get as close as they could to what Brandon had in mind. Because Brandon said it was blue with polka dots, you were always trying to figure out what that meant. It was like putting you in a dark room and saying, “I’m in here too. Find me.” It was very frustrating.

  Warren: The epitome of my approach to programming versus Brandon’s arrived at NBC in the form of Dick Wolf in 1989. Dick showed up with more than a pitch. He arrived armed with a show called Law & Order that he’d sold twice already and had shot a pilot for. L&O featured a new and distinctive form of storytelling for TV, something no development executive—even one as talented as Brandon—would have known to ask for.

  Dick Wolf: I think Law & Order was the only series ever sold to three networks. I sold a pilot to CBS, but before that I sold thirteen on the air to Barry Diller at Fox. He called me two days later and told me he’d made a mistake, that Law & Order wasn’t a Fox show.

  Warren: Barry Diller was right.

  Brian Pike: I’d just taken over development when Law & Order was made. Dick Wolf wanted us to see his pilot that CBS had passed on. We all went downstairs and watched it, and it was rea
lly good. It broke a lot of rules, but it was really compelling.

  I remember the opening shot like it was yesterday. I’d never seen anything like it. It opened with a bizarrely high camera that was shaking. You heard this noise in the background, heavy breathing and a snort. I was like, “Why is the camera so high?” and the camera looks over, and there are feet behind a bush. Then you turn around, and you see a policeman on a horse in Central Park.

  Dick Wolf: CBS had walked away from Law & Order. It was a dead pilot. Eight months later, we were losing all the actors, so we took it to NBC and screened it.

  Brandon said, “This is very interesting, but how are you going to do that every week?”

  I said, “Give me six scripts, and I’ll prove it to you.” We wrote six scripts, and Brandon ordered thirteen. I think there’d be a lot lower failure ratio if people wrote six scripts before there was a firm order.

  Warren: Dick was given an opportunity, and he delivered. If I had learned anything from working with Steven Bochco on Hill Street Blues, it was that sometimes the things that scare you have the biggest upside. Dick’s lack of convention was unpredictable and scary, but it was also compelling.

  Coincidentally, as we were rolling out Law & Order, Bochco was about to premiere his own cop show on ABC, which was using up most of the available publicity oxygen. It was called Cop Rock, and the pilot was under wraps, held so close that I couldn’t turn up anybody who’d seen it and was finding it impossible to get my hands on a copy. I worried that the show would be Bochco brilliant and create scheduling problems for us with Law & Order and Hunter, our vehicle for the talented (and meant to star in a drama) Fred Dryer.